A Little Taste of Traditional Chinese Medicine

This week has been all about self-care.

Self-care, today, meant wearing a mask when I was outside. I woke up feeling sick in my throat and lungs again and am learning it's probably best to wear a mask more than I'd care too. After today, I decided I've got to get a better looking mask though. Plaid is just NOT my style!

Across the street from our school is a small, sketch-like building with blind massage therapists. It was suggested I go to one. I once watched a documentary about blind people in Nepal who were trained in massage therapy. It makes complete sense to me that a blind person would actually be an AMAZING person to massage me because they're far more adept in using their intuitive senses than those who can see are.

It has been.....an experience. A painful one and, at times, even scary but also a helpful one! I bravely (or dumbly) let the lady use a cupping therapy on me. I'm not sure I'll do that again with her. And by not sure, I think I mean I probably will. It was cheap and it helped even if I was nervous I would throw up right then and there. I can move my neck now and my back pain is considerably less. It was worth it. I think.

The after effect is various shades of bruising.

Tonight I ventured to an international hospital. I parked my scooter at the Metro station, had a brief little "chat" with a man who appeared to either be trying to figure out how to get his scooter from the mess of trapped bikes or trying to determine if he should steal my scooter. I left hoping I'd return to both my scooter and a way to get out WITH my scooter!

It has been said the area of town I live in, Pudong, is like the New Jersey of New York. Basically all the cool peeps live on the other side of the river in an area called Puxi. They also live in the heart of the worst pollution and even more mobs of people. There's pros and cons. Everything closes at 9pm on my side. Clearly Puxi is where the weekend fun happens.

You always know when you're getting closer to Puxi. The buildings get bigger and bigger. 

This is actually still Pudong, but it's thirty minutes from my Metro stop. If you haven't noticed, Shanghai is BIG. My part of town is like downtown Denver. This part of town is like New York. Puxi is like New York on steroids.

The view from the hospital. FYI, it wasn't an overcast day...

Apparently in China almost everything even the least bit medical is done at a hospital. For a gal who has spent far too much time in hospitals, I am not a fan.

In the states, when you see a holistic practitioner it would NEVER be in a hospital. Here, there are TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) sides to hospitals and there are what we would call "traditional" hospital sides. Even though it is bizarre to go to hospitals for everything, I do appreciate insurances cover holistic therapies here!

One of the things I have been interested to learn more about since realizing I was moving to China, has been their Chinese herbs. It's a little more challenging than you'd think...or at least a little more challenging than I thought it would be! Maybe all of you already think everything is challenging in general here - in which case, you are correct.

I saw my new naturopath thinking I would get a health consultation, receive some herbal supplements, and create a plan of action. She wanted to just do acupuncture instead.  

I've done acupuncture once in the states but that was it. It didn't seem to help but you're supposed to do it more than once for good results. At the time I was doing so many other therapies for my ski injury that I had to choose. I chose massages, cupping, and chiropractic care. Clearly they all helped, otherwise I couldn't have made the flight over here! THAT, my friends, still astounds me. 

Thus, I was less than thrilled about wasting my evening getting acupuncture. Thankfully, I was able to convince her to give me some herbs to help strengthen my immunity. I'm sick for the second time already.

Then she began to do her whole acupuncture thing. It wasn't a big deal. Typical needles getting stuck to various meridians and such. Fascinating, yet honestly I was still a skeptic of how much acupuncture helps. 

UNTIL, she got out these chords connected to a machine and began attaching them to the needles that were on my stomach.

Remember the phrase, "just go with it"? Perhaps it's not the wisest phrase to keep handy when someone is connecting some sort of electrode thingy to needles in your stomach but when in China....

Immediately I started to feel pulses going into my stomach. It was actually really cool! My ankle has randomly been swollen and super painful so she connected it to my ankle as well. It was rather painful, but at least she spoke good English and understood when I said it was too much The blind massage lady? Not so much, hence the nearly throwing up. 

This type of accupuncture makes sense to me. I'm sure many of you are reading this with all sorts of questions and wide eyes, but after being hooked up to tens units and various therapeutic devices after my pelvis injury, this REALLY DOES make sense!

I may be a new believer in acupuncture...... 


As long as I'm hooked up to an electric shock machine. That just makes it sound THAT much better, dontcha think!?


P.S. For the skeptics out there (and I know there are a lot of you), my ankle is ALREADY less painful and, since having the cupping done, I have had far less pain in my shoulder and neck! Ya'll should try it! ;)